Power-of-two sampling in redundancy systems: The impact of assignment constraints

A classical sampling strategy for load balancing policies is power-of-two, where any server pair is sampled with equal probability. This does not cover practical settings with assignment constraints which force non-uniform sampling. While intuition suggests that non-uniform sampling adversely impact...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inOperations research letters Vol. 50; no. 6; pp. 699 - 706
Main Authors Cardinaels, Ellen, Borst, Sem, van Leeuwaarden, Johan S.H.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier B.V 01.11.2022
Subjects
Light traffic
Load balancing
Parallel-server systems
Power-of-two
Redundancy scheduling
Stochastic comparison
Stochastic comparison
Power-of-two
Load balancing
Light traffic
Parallel-server systems
Redundancy scheduling
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Summary:A classical sampling strategy for load balancing policies is power-of-two, where any server pair is sampled with equal probability. This does not cover practical settings with assignment constraints which force non-uniform sampling. While intuition suggests that non-uniform sampling adversely impacts performance, this was only supported through simulations, and rigorous statements have remained elusive. Building on product-form distributions for redundancy systems, we prove the stochastic dominance of uniform sampling for a four-server system as well as arbitrary-size systems in light traffic.
ISSN:0167-6377
1872-7468
DOI:10.1016/j.orl.2022.10.006